3 answers to Gamification and Big Data questions

Gamification and Big Data often go hand in hand. It’s worth asking a few key questions as to why and how:

1. Why is gamification a critical component of any data strategy?

Because gamification provides the context and reason for data sharing between player (e.g. consumer) and manager (e.g. company). i.e. loyalty programs are primitive examples of gamification – you exchange your data (shopping at the supermarket) in return for rewards (redeemable points).

2. “Manage Data like a stream not an ocean.” What does that mean in a Rise context?

With big data you cannot and should not be storing everything in the hope that it will one day be valuable (the data ocean / data lake approach) – this is a waste of resources. Data isn’t that valuable, it is tricky and expensive to store well and you’ll probably never use it. Instead you should be planning ahead, processing the stream as it happens and act at the time, using it to kick start other processes.

For example, Rise processes 90 days of social data into online scores for sales reps wanting to become better at social selling. Each week we create a ‘release’ which summarises the previous week. In so doing we keep a permanent history of their aggregate scores but delete the raw data.

3. Are data brokers like Rise going to be increasingly needed?

Yes, as data privacy becomes an increasingly complex area between employees, the company you work for and the apps you use – there is a key role for data brokers like Rise who protect and support the data interests of all parties. For example in social selling programs, we allow employees to share Linkedin data with their employer on number of new connections per month but do not allow the employer to see who those connections are.